A Temporary Dojo
After classes ended, Park Woochan made his way to the training hall.
Not as a teacher this time, though — as a student.
Waiting for him there stood one of the Academy's guest instructors.
Mr. Jung Ilhyun.
The father of Jung Pilyeon, one of the students under Park Woochan's care.
...Ever since Mr. Jung Ilhyun — who had originally run a dojang for hunters — accepted the Academy's request and took the guest instructor post, the dojang had effectively been forced to close its doors.
Though honestly, it was doomed from the start, one might say. Most hunters either ignored the importance of technique entirely, or even when they understood it, simply had no time to learn.
And yet.
There was someone who'd taken note of that problem.
No point hiding it — it was Park Woochan himself. Lately he'd been feeling the need to raise his skills, after all. Whether against hunters or monsters.
A hunting art for taking down Extra-standard monsters. Or a swordsmanship to counter the likes of Tae Siyoung.
The same went for his ongoing efforts to rework the magic he'd obtained from Dr. Pyeong So-woon's laboratory.
So Park Woochan paid the tuition fee. When it came to hunting techniques, well, that was one thing, but there was simply no swordsman in the vicinity better than Mr. Jung Ilhyun at the moment.
Mr. Jung Ilhyun accepted him without a word of complaint. He had shut the dojang, admittedly, but that was partly thanks to a personality that had never once turned away anyone who came to learn.
The only problem was that shuttling between the dojang and the Academy was a hassle either way.
And so Park Woochan, newly appointed as a full-time teacher, had borrowed the training hall and turned it into a temporary dojang. A branch location, in effect.
"If it's no trouble, might it be all right to bring along my lacking son as well?"
Needless to say, Park Woochan had no reason to object.
And so, quite unexpectedly, a dojang opened for business inside the training hall.
"The techniques you use are Western-style greatsword arts, I see."
"Ah, yes. That particular one's from the Portuguese school, actually..."
"Your fundamentals aren't bad. It seems you had an excellent teacher."
"Hahaha."
An excellent teacher, was it? He wasn't sure whether to call it that. When he'd first learned it, the man had fussed and meddled over every tiny detail to the point of driving him insane.
Then again, it was a technique he'd picked up from the hunters he'd worked alongside, all in the name of surviving the Great Invasion. Instead of saying any of that, Park Woochan just laughed awkwardly.
Fortunately, Mr. Jung Ilhyun didn't press him any further.
"Your build is well suited to it, and you already meet all the conditions for handling the techniques."
"Thank you."
"However..."
"However?"
"There's a severe imbalance between your techniques."
"Ah... figured as much?"
The swordsmanship that formed Park Woochan's foundation currently consisted of three distinct elements.
The first was the butchering art Park Woochan had acquired. The second was the techniques developed for hunting monsters. The third was the greatsword art he'd just mentioned.
He'd honed it partly to build up his knowledge of monsters, and partly to earn his operating funds. The techniques he'd refined back then were so valuable to him that he'd gone so far as to craft a ridiculously oversized weapon around them.
Then there were the superhuman strength and senses unique to active-duty hunters — and the same applied to technique itself. The sword arts hunters had developed independently for the sake of slaying monsters. Among those, the power fighters who wielded greatswords like his own had been a particularly rich source, and the techniques he'd studied intensively under them, fused with his weapon work, was what made Park Woochan who he was today.
Compared to those three, the greatsword art played a relatively minor role. But with the countless hunters he'd eventually have to face, such techniques were necessary for him too. Who knew — it might even come in handy against human-shaped monsters.
Add to that Shukuchi and other footwork and lightness techniques, plus a dash of hand-to-hand combat, and that roughly summed up Park Woochan's direct combat capabilities, setting aside tools and traps.
However.
Mr. Jung Ilhyun had pointed out a structural weakness in that whole combat doctrine.
In a word: the applications were too far apart.
Say, for instance, that Park Woochan was standing there with his weapon in hand as usual. And then an enemy appeared right in front of him.
Park Woochan would be presented with three options in total.
Using the weapon as a butchering tool to strip the enemy's hide. Swinging the greatsword to crush a monster larger than any human. Or employing the greatsword art to deal with an enemy of roughly similar size.
At that point, Park Woochan suffered a loss of time.
Worse, imagine the opponent was a monster disguised in human form.
'Tiamat would be ideal here.'
Just like that — say Tiamat was unleashing her full power right in front of him. All three of the aforementioned methods would each prove reasonably effective in their own way.
Up to that point, things weren't bad. The more cards you could play, the less you stood to lose, after all. At worst, it beat having no cards at all.
But.
Which of the three methods should he choose? Which of the three would be the most effective option?
Those were precisely the questions he couldn't help but hesitate over.
In a word, his techniques were grinding against each other. Call it an integrated martial system and it sounded nice, but in practice it was just a careless mishmash. A state of affairs that, even as a joke, couldn't be called a single unified art.
That was Mr. Jung Ilhyun's assessment.
To be sure, nothing had gone wrong so far — that much was undeniable fact. But Park Woochan couldn't attribute that to his own skill.
He simply hadn't needed to face hunters until now. He simply hadn't happened to encounter any Extra-standard monsters among the ones he'd fought. In Park Woochan's eyes, it was exactly that and nothing more.
"Comparing the three techniques you mentioned, the first and second are at a fairly similar level. It's the third that falls short, then."
"Yes. And in truth, there's a gap even between the first and second."
"Oh?"
"The first technique wasn't created for combat to begin with."
"Ah, right."
"Not that it's bad — it should serve fine in applied use. But."
Setting aside his level of proficiency, was the technique itself complete enough to be used in actual extermination work? Asked that way, even Park Woochan had no choice but to shake his head.
"No — it's something I half-improvised, honestly."
"Then what should be done? Would it be better to give up on it?"
"No, there's no need for that. As it happens, there are weapon arts built specifically around tools like the great scythe, you know."
"Huh."
"The problem is your stance."
Hunters possessed transcendent power. Because of that, even a sloppy stance would produce force beyond all expectations.
But.
What he faced were creatures entirely beyond human comprehension.
A tiny gap. Beasts capable of driving a blade into even the smallest opening that, for anyone with a hunter's power, would have meant nothing at all.
In other words, the combat butchering art Park Woochan had been using until now was, despite its name, just ordinary butchering technique — nothing more. He'd merely been forcing it to function through a hunter's inhuman strength.
Which meant that once he learned proper form, the gains in efficiency would be beyond measure.
The great scythe weapon art mentioned earlier was a case in point. There was no way the movements of a farmer cutting rice and a weapon art for severing a horse's legs would share the same form, no matter what anyone said.
"Fortunately, watching you demonstrate it a few times, I'm starting to get a feel for it. I'll work something out on that front."
"Teacher!!"
"I'm a guest instructor, remember."
In a tone considerably gentler than at their first meeting, Mr. Jung Ilhyun waved off Park Woochan's attempt to throw his arms around him. To Park Woochan, it felt like ten thousand reinforcements arriving at once.
In any case, Park Woochan knew his own limits all too well. Until now, he'd been scraping by on the frenzied instinct that seized him the moment a monster stood before him.
Techniques for taking down monsters — hunting arts — were one thing, but pure weapon art alone could never carry him to greatness. And besides, what was he supposed to do, invent new forms like some grandmaster of a school? Not impossible, maybe, but he'd be lucky if the result rose above back-alley martial arts.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Jung Ilhyun's help felt like a long-awaited rain on parched ground.
"Now then, there are two main things you must do, Teacher."
"I'm listening."
"As I said, there's no need to polish your swordsmanship from scratch at this point..."
Mr. Jung Ilhyun quietly extended two fingers.
"First — strip away your bad habits."
"O-oh."
"Now that the traces of the techniques I mentioned are ingrained in your body, you won't be able to absorb anything new. You understand?"
"I suppose that's true."
"So when you practice a new technique, I'd like you to push yourself until you're on the verge of passing out."
"I'm sorry, what?"
Something distinctly ominous had just been said.
While Park Woochan tilted his head in bewilderment, Mr. Jung Ilhyun opened his mouth once more.
"And second — practice against multiple opponents."
"Multiple opponents?"
"Yes. Ideally, opponents who pose no danger to you even when you're exhausted and about to collapse."
"Why is that?"
"You know of mixed martial arts, I take it?"
"I do."
"It's the same principle."
Mr. Jung Ilhyun continued, giving the training hall floor a light scuff with his foot.
"MMA fighters generally learn and employ several martial arts at the same time."
"That's right."
"Then suppose there's a fighter whose base is boxing, with Muay Thai layered on top."
"So, a former boxer."
"Exactly. Now let's say this fellow spent five whole years doing nothing but boxing. Devoted himself to that single well."
"Quite the impressive fellow."
"Five years pass, and our impressive friend enters the world of mixed martial arts."
"And learns Muay Thai on top of it, I gather."
"Precisely. Now — how many years do you suppose he practiced that newly learned Muay Thai?"
"Huh?"
By that point, Park Woochan was starting to catch on.
"Naturally, he wouldn't have drilled it for five straight years like the rest. Why do you think that is?"
"Because he had a foundational art — boxing, in this case."
A base had been laid. In other words, the fighter in the example had built his foundation in boxing, and after searching for a technique that complemented it, what he'd landed on was Muay Thai.
"So then — what does Muay Thai mean to our boxer?"
"An extension of his boxing, I'd say."
"Correct."
The complementary relationship between Muay Thai and boxing. In other words: find a stance that lets you employ both at once. From there, blend the techniques of the two arts so you can handle any number of situations. To an observer, it would look like mixed martial arts — but to the fighter himself, it would feel like a natural extension of his boxing.
Five years of boxing, five years of Muay Thai. It wasn't a matter of stacking two arts to an equal level and then blending them. You set one as your baseline and folded the other into it. Five years of boxing, plus one additional year of Muay Thai.
In other words, treat it like DLC that gets unlocked on top of the base game.
It was a surprisingly persuasive argument. Park Woochan nodded along.
"To put it bluntly — honest, straightforward training is out of the question. There simply isn't time. And besides, the martial arts have no end in the first place."
"I see."
"Which is why your task, Teacher, is the blending."
Drive the bad habits out of the body by working it to the brink of collapse. Then, starting from a completely blank slate, layer the other two techniques around the foundational one. Park Woochan's height, frame, weight, physical capabilities, weapon type, footwork — taking every condition into account, adapt it all into the form that fit him best. Then came Mr. Jung Ilhyun's grading. And after that, the entire process repeated from the beginning, over and over.
In short: an order-made combat doctrine tailored to Park Woochan's own body.
A method for raising one's swordsmanship in a mere few years simply didn't exist. Therefore, you raised the technique itself to fit your own hunting art — not by juggling multiple techniques side by side or shoving them together awkwardly as he did now, but by building them as a single, unified art.
"It would be a waste, wouldn't it?"
"Pardon?"
"The time, certainly — but you've already laid a foundation, after all. Let's put it to the fullest possible use."
"Ah — yes. Thank you."
"It's nothing compared to the favor you've shown me. Well then, we'll stop here for today. Get some rest."
"I'll go round up the kids and send them home, then."
With those words, Park Woochan gave a deep bow toward Mr. Jung Ilhyun, who had turned his back to the training hall.
And then he thought:
Water... give me water...
Damn it. Dead. They're dead.
The two figures sprawled across the floor at that very moment — and Park Woochan wondered: if he threw himself into serious training the way Jung Pilyeon and Ja Hayeon clearly had, was that what he would become, too?
Jung Ilhyun, former B-rank hunter. And at the same time, a martial theorist said to have grasped the flow of mana through the refinement of technique alone. It had been vaguely apparent from their very first conversation, but the man was, unexpectedly, a strict taskmaster when it came to his own field of expertise.